Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Satan's Balls

Greetings, WYMOP fans!

This post is a day late, I know. But I have a fantastic reason. An amazing excuse. The excuse is so good, I made an entire post just about that. Now the post itself, the excuse, is rather short, and pretty easy to read. In order to understand it, however, I need to give you a little pre-post prep work.Ready?

Pre-post Prep #1: Policy.

The postal service has several policies regarding their vehicles, but for the purposes of this rant, I’m going to focus on just one: when unoccupied, the vehicle must be secured. This includes, my current postmaster has pointed out, the windows, regardless of the weather. Oh, you can leave the windows of your own personal vehicle down all day long, just as you might when parking at the beach and wanting the car to ventilate a bit while you’re worshipping at the sandy altar to the gods of surf and sun. But a postal vehicle is a different story.

A postal vehicle may only have its windows open to a certain degree, defined as follows:

upon the shoulders of another seventy-five pound crack whore (because they are known to travel in pairs and packs, pulling crimes with all the balancing flair of a traditional Chinese acrobat troupe), could possibly shove her spindly, scabrous, pipe-cleaner arm in through the gap and grab some of the mail—or even, it has been posited, unlock the door from the inside, enabling the two (or more) of them to crack the steering column and hotwire the vehicle. They would then, of course, drive the entire day’s worth of mail off to their secret, evil crack whore lair, where they will roll about in the mail, tossing handfuls into the air and rubbing it on their faces as if it was money—of course they’re not going to act rational about it: they’re crack whores.”

I may have been paraphrasing.

Pre-post Prep #2: Satan

Picture, if you will, taking a little trip down the ninth circle of Dante’s Hell, where you come upon the huge form of Satan, the Father of Lies, the Lord of all Evil (with the capital

“E,” yet!), just as trapped within a lake of ice as he has been since the Fall. You and your friends—let’s face it, nobody’s going to want to do this alone—drive out on the ice in dump trucks, deftly avoiding the Evil One’s six beating wings, to dump, spray, shovel, and rake, several tons of premium-grade ice-melt onto Satan’s cocoon of cold, eventually freeing the Lord of Flies from a restraint that has held him for thousands of years.

Now, of course old Lucifer’s going to be feeling grateful to you—but imagine his surprise when you, in your best infomercial voice, say “But wait! There’s more!” The look on his face when you hand him the deed to a beach house, right on the shore of the Lake of Fire on one of the upper levels, is absolutely priceless. He takes possession immediately, longing for the warmer climate after spending millennia as the World’s Most Evil Frozen Dinner. Since he’s not been able to exercise since long before Jesus Christ was even a gleam in His Father’s eye, the Devil is seriously appreciative that the beach house is well stocked with exercise tapes, and sets out right away to get himself into bikini shape.

So, if you’re still with me here, try now to picture this next bit: you show up at Satan’s

beach house, walking in to find the Lord of All Evil lying flat on his back. His face is purple. His flesh quivers. Air, hot enough to broil steak due to the proximity of the Lake of Fire, rasps in and out of his great lungs. You may imagine for a moment that he’s having a heart attack—if, that is, Old Scratch could be said to have a heart. But no, all that’s happened is the Enemy has just gone through Sweating With the Oldies 1-5, kicked and punched his ass off alongside of Billy Blanks, and then finished up with Shaun T’s Insanity Workout.

The Master of All that is Unholy, eons out of shape, has collapsed in front of his widescreen, in a gasping, sweating, pungent, eldritch, goat-leggedy mess.

Now, you’re going to have to bear with me on this part.

I want you to imagine—just imagine—you’re holding some sort of device in one hand, designed for reading temperatures and collecting samples of the third state of matter: gas. There’s a capture tank with some kind of straw protruding from one end, with a thermometer attached. Maybe it’s got a squeeze bulb on it, allowing you to suck in a sample turkey baster style, maybe it’s a trigger mechanism. Doesn’t matter. Use your imagination.

But now for the hard part.

Imagine approaching that hot, sweaty, fallen mess, reaching out with a gloved hand (or a pencil, maybe a pen, if you don’t have gloves of some kind), and lifting the Adversary’s applebag. Beelzebub's ballsack. Lucifer’s love bundle. The Devil’s dangly bits.

That’s right, I want you to imagine you’re hoisting up the Satanic scrotum.

Then, have a quick go with that little atmosphere-collector gizmo you dreamed up, about a paragraph back. Stick that probe-end in under there—but not too far, you don’t want to give Satan an actual heart attack—and get a sample. Take a reading.

The temperature (and remember, you’re within spitting distance of a vast lake of fire!) is roughly 10,000,000 degrees—equivalent to the surface of the sun. Unlike the sun, however, this ain’t a dry heat. The capture tank in your collector gizmo is filled with the dank, rank, moist, musty, and thoroughly disgusting fumes to be found ‘neath the squackbag of someone trying to keep up with a happy and excited Richard Simmons for five consecutive workout tapes—and Billy Blanks—and Shaun T. When you look into the collection tank’s viewport you can’t even see through the brown murk in there, and though the tank itself is supposed to be airtight, you still catch a whiff that nearly knocks you out, a quick reminder that our workout-whacky Wicked One hasn’t actually washed his undercarriage since before recorded time.

The Quick Excuse:

Okay, I told you all that so you would understand when I tell you this.

Yesterday, in Marblehead, it was somewhere in the mid-to-high nineties. All day. It was hot. And sunny. And hot. Now, whenever all the shady parking spots were taken up along my route, I had to park where the sun could beat down on my mail truck like John Henry on steroids. I had to. It’s my job. And after I’d walked around for two or three relays, the sun beating on me with all the fury of Mike Tyson after someone called him a sissy, I just wanted to get out of the sun, turn on the fan and get some relief. I walked up to my truck, nudged aside the small pile of exhausted crack whores that had built up against the door in my absence, opened the truck, crawled inside—and it was hot and nasty as Satan’s balls in there!

That was my “relief from the heat.”

Is it any wonder that last night I was a little exhausted, a little dazed, a little sick, and just not up to writing a blog post?